Did Meghan Markle Use A Surrogate? Inside The Wild Rumor She Can't Escape

Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, probably didn't expect her pregnancy to give birth to some pretty weird rumors the world actually believed at one point. The rumor that might've taken the cake, however, was the idea that she was never truly pregnant to begin with. Word started spreading on the internet that she might've used a surrogate to deliver her first child, Prince Archie. In some cases, the gossip had gotten so wild that even Meghan showing her baby bump in public couldn't quiet the conspiracies. Instead, that only added more mystery to the plot, as many were convinced that she was faking her pregnancy to throw everyone off her trail.

To legitimize what they felt was a lie, skeptics believed she went so far as to pass off prosthetics as her pregnant stomach. Meghan hasn't responded to the controversy directly. However, she did touch on how challenging it was dealing with the difficulties of royal life and the negative attention, especially following her pregnancy. "Any woman, especially when they're pregnant, you're really vulnerable, and so that was made really challenging," she once said in a 2019 interview with ITV News. "And then, when you have a newborn, you know. ... And especially as a woman, it's really, it's a lot. So you add this on top of just trying to be a new mom or trying to be a newlywed." It's unclear but possible that the surrogacy rumors were on her mind at the time she made the remark.

The rumors resurfaced when Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, welcomed their second child, Princess Lilibet. Even Meghan's estranged half-sister, Samantha Markle, spurred the rumors on by further alluding to the possibility that the royal pregnancy was a sham. But the "Suits" actor herself unwittingly played a part in amplifying the discourse. A still-pregnant Meghan and Harry embarrassed themselves with cringy delivery dance moves they recorded before Lilibet's birth, which they published on Instagram four years later in 2025. Not only did Meghan's critics believe that the vid lacked taste, but some didn't think a pregnant body could move the way hers did during the sequence. However, some people online disagreed with the take, drawing from their own experiences being pregnant and arguing that Meghan's baby bump couldn't have looked more real in the video.

Other skeptics felt the video exposed Meghan's fake pregnancy because her stomach didn't appear to be smooth in the clip, which potentially indicated the use of prosthetics. But a doctor came forward and provided another explanation. "The 'lumps' visible on Meghan's bump are most likely CTG monitors (cardiotocography), which are commonly used to check the baby's heart rate and the frequency of contractions," Dr. Farah Ahmed said in an interview with Tyla. Furthermore, Ahmed asserted that the California native's movements during the video were beneficial to both herself and her child. So, it was ultimately a good thing Meghan's second pregnancy didn't slow her down as much as expected. If anything, the dance number seemingly removed any possibility that the surrogacy rumors were true.